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WLED (upstream) — monthly activity digest

What landed on wled/WLED's main branch, month by month. External-context reference — a factual log of a friend repo's releases, not projectMM's own history or roadmap. Newest month on top. The reusable prompt that generates these lives in README.md.

Months are not split at release dates: upstream WLED cuts releases from separate release branches (0_15, 16_x), so the version tags aren't on main — main is the development trunk that feeds future releases. Each month notes which release shipped, as context.

June 2026

Post-16.0 stabilisation month: no new version tag (v16.0.0 shipped 2026-05-03 off a release branch, so the month is not split), just a steady stream of bugfixes and small additions landing on main.

New - HUB75 matrix panels: added a "Seengreat" pinout, plus fixes for 4-scan and chained-panel setups. - Renamed the "CW" LED type to "CCT" for clarity when configuring CCT white strips. - V5-C6 boards are now covered by the V5 build.

Fixed - "Rainbow" and other color-wheel effects no longer mis-drive the white channel on RGBW strips. - Restored the pre-16.0 look of several effects that had changed appearance after the 16.0 upgrade (also fixes the DJ Light intensity regression). - HUB75: restored missing pixel trails on some 2D effects (Black Hole, Lissajous, Spaceships). - Fixed a crash when creating a 2D setup larger than the actual number of LEDs. - Fixed LED glitches on long strips with ESP32-C3. - Nightlight: brightness now applies correctly, including small transition steps, and no longer resets when set to max brightness. - Color no longer jumps when you change it mid-transition; gamma is now applied correctly during realtime/live-data override. - Improved boot behaviour for boot presets, and "Reset segments" now respects "Make a segment for each output". - Fixed a ledmap parser reading past the end of the map, an analog-button reading fix, and a pixel-buffer refresh after changing matrix dimensions. - Better brownout detection and extended error codes aligned with WLED-MM.

Watching - Discussion opened on switching from plain gamma to an sRGB transfer function for better low-brightness accuracy (#5707), and on improving the Nodes/Instances page (#5711) — no shipped outcome yet. - Several v16.0 field reports still open: multi-controller sync losing colour (#5705), UDP sync failing in AP mode (#5709), and OTA-update trouble on some boards (#5682, #5702).

Auditability: 43 commits on main with author-date 2026-06-01..2026-06-30 (repos/wled/WLED/commits?sha=main, first-line view; a few older-dated cherry-picks appear in-range and were excluded as non-June). Issues via search/issues for repo:wled/WLED created:2026-06-01..2026-06-30 (18 opened) and closed:2026-06-01..2026-06-30 (25 closed); only user-facing ones surfaced. No versioned release published in June (v16.0.0 was 2026-05-03), so no month split.

May 2026

Summarised from 72 first-parent commits on main, 2026-05-01 … 2026-05-31. (Trunk after the v16.0.0 release on May 3; v16 is codenamed "Kagayaki".)

New / boards

  • HUB75: FM6124 driver for 4-scan panels and the 64×64 limit removed on PSRAM boards; new ESP32-S3-without-PSRAM build environments; option to build against the Espressif framework instead of Tasmota.

Fixed / hardened

  • Effects: restored palette wrap in color_wheel() (a regression since 0.15.x), Twinkle fixes, Dissolve "Complete" same-colour-as-background fix, gravity audio-reactive top-LED fix.
  • Audio-reactive auto-suspends in realtime modes (but stays on with "use main segment only").
  • DDP and all realtime protocols: relaxed-but-safer header acceptance + bounds checks; Improv/UDP parsing hardened; /reset auth clarified.
  • Auto-migration for legacy sunrise/sunset config; animated-staircase inverted-PIR support.

April 2026

Summarised from 67 first-parent commits on main, 2026-04-01 … 2026-04-30. (v16.0.0-beta was tagged April 11.)

New / effects

  • Game of Life fix; FPS bump via a fast path in blendSegment; better packet queuing/pacing for custom-palette live preview.
  • PixelForge palette/tools list moved into the repo; fxdata serialized without ArduinoJSON (smaller/faster).

Fixed

  • Critical Candle-FX bug + Flow-FX integer issue; segment inputs no longer restrict trailing strips; iOS blending-style list filter; DDP flag-bit masking for compatibility; robustness rewinding file pointers before writes.
  • (Otherwise a heavy AI-contributor-guideline / docs month.)

March 2026

Summarised from 65 first-parent commits on main, 2026-03-01 … 2026-03-31. (v0.15.4 shipped March 14 from the 0_15 release branch; trunk version bumped to 17.0.0-dev.)

New / effects

  • Full FastLED replacement merged (#4615) — WLED's own colour/math instead of the FastLED dependency.
  • Many new user_fx effects: Spinning Wheel, Color Clouds, Lava Lamp, Magma, Ants, Morse Code, Comet (fire particle system), a slow >4-hour transition FX, Tetris line-clear flash.
  • Scrolling-text FX gains custom fonts + international UTF-8; stencil blending mode; ESP32-C3 audio-reactive (DSP FFT + integer math); more macro/timer slots; longer max playlist duration.
  • OTA update page restyled (auto-sets download URL from info.repo); clearer UI tool icons.

Fixed

  • Segment-index misalignment; hostname/DNS cleanup; hue preservation in colour fade; array-bounds on short WS payloads; DDP rejects unsupported/non-display packets.

February 2026

Summarised from 35 first-parent commits on main, 2026-02-01 … 2026-02-28.

New

  • Version scheme changed to Major.minor (dropped the leading "0."), heading toward v16; bumped to 16.0.0-alpha.
  • New Pin Info page (used/available pins overview); UI settings readability improvements.
  • Improved bus handling — free choice of bus driver in any order, better memory calculations; gamma lower-limit removed (enables inverse gamma correction, applied to segment brightness too).
  • Extended CCT blending (exclusive blend, colour-jump fix); full WiFi scan with BSSID apply; new ESP32-S3 8MB QSPI build; experimental ESP32-C5/C6 in the node list.

Fixed

  • LED animations briefly pausing at bootup (ESP32); boot-up WiFi pause with extended scanning; removed dangerous mutex macros in the bus manager; Flow-FX flow at segment start/end.

January 2026

Summarised from 38 first-parent commits on main, 2026-01-01 … 2026-01-31.

New

  • New custom-palettes editor (#5010); WPA-Enterprise WiFi support; random per-LED colours via JSON API; option to save unmodified presets to autosave; PixelForge GIF image rotation.
  • Removed the MAX_LEDS_PER_BUS limit for virtual buses; new ESP32 node types; JSON validation + minify on file upload in the UI.

Fixed

  • Relay not turning on at boot; GPIO0 always grabbed by a button; gamma correction on a fresh install; Ethernet static-IP ignored; HUB75 improvements; config exceeding the LED limit.

December 2025

Summarised from 39 first-parent commits on main, 2025-12-01 … 2025-12-31. (v0.15.3 shipped December 4 from the 0_15 release branch.)

New / effects

  • PacMan effect and the new "WLEDPixelForge" image & scrolling-text interface (#4982); dynamic LED-type dropdown; improved 2D particle collisions; sequential UI-resource loading.
  • Usermod Temperature uses full 12-bit precision; "peek" shows gaps; removed legacy EEPROM support.

Fixed

  • FX checkmark sync; UI TypeError with a custom palette; rotary-encoder palette-count off-by-one; particle-collision binning; segment overflow.

November 2025

Summarised from 46 first-parent commits on main, 2025-11-01 … 2025-11-30. (v0.15.2-beta1 → v0.15.2 shipped Nov 9 / Nov 29 from the 0_15 release branch.)

New

  • New file editor (#4956) with ctrl+S, toasts, efficient ledmap reading, 0-byte-file handling.
  • DDP over WebSocket; improved 1D GIF support with blur option; variable button count up to 32; Dissolve "Complete" mode (always fades fully).
  • Aurora FX speedups; better PSRAM-MB usage reporting; bootloader offsets for C3/S3 + variable bootloader sizes per MCU; Adafruit board partitions.

Fixed

  • Stale UI after firmware updates; AP-not-showing (default channel tweaks); device-fingerprint crashes; millis()-rollover robustness in wait logic; OTA update for C3 from 0.15; ESP8266 low-heap and DMA fixes.

October 2025

Summarised from 9 first-parent commits on main, 2025-10-01 … 2025-10-31.

  • Quiet month on trunk. DDP over WebSocket groundwork (shared WS connection in common.js); Twinkle blank-area fix; low-brightness gradient "jumpyness" fix; bootloop-tracker safety check; GIF-player inactive-segment + copy-FX bugfixes.

September 2025

Summarised from 41 first-parent commits on main, 2025-09-01 … 2025-09-30.

New / effects

  • Shimmer FX added; "unrestricted" number of custom palettes; center-bin selection for 2D GEQ; Twinklecat reverse option; speed optimisations + restoreColorLossy fix.
  • Heap-memory and PSRAM handling improvements; HUB75 AC fixes.

Fixed

  • Tri Fade FX; custom-palette colour picker; Colortwinkles; LED buffer-size calculation; UDP name-sync rework; crash debug output added.